Polyphenols and Sarcopenia: Hope from a Meta-Analysis?

The TLDR:

• Polyphenols found in tea, chocolate, soy, and cocoa have many health benefits
• Sarcopenia is muscle mass loss with aging: it is associated with falls, death, and is an important factor in physical therapy management
• A new Meta-analysis and Systematic Review highlights some possible benefits of supplementing with these polyphenols on sarcopenia...listen to the video for more!

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Transcript:

Good afternoon everyone, Dr. Wells here from Nutritional Physical Therapy, here with a research update. This one is a recent publication from the Journal of Frailty in Aging. The authors are Maduro and Davinelli.

The title is Polyphenol Supplementation in Sarcopenia. It's a meta-analysis and a systematic review of clinical trials. So effectively these authors went out and collected data oriented around whether polyphenol supplementation helps with sarcopenia.

We as physical therapists, strength coaches, personal trainers, we look at sarcopenia quite a bit. That's that age-related muscle mass loss, right? It's very important. It's linked with death.

It's linked with falls. It's linked with broken bones. So it's very important to us.

So polyphenols on the other hand, what are those? Those are a group of phytochemicals. There's a large group of subclasses of phytochemicals. A lot of times I tell people these are those things that are never found on the labels, but they're really important because they offer a lot of antioxidants, anti-inflammatory, and other gut-related benefits.

So what were the findings? Well, they basically found that of these 344 articles, only seven of them really came out to be included in the systematic review. The results showed that polyphenol supplementation had a significant effect on muscle mass. Well, it didn't have an effect on muscle strength and it had a near significant importance for physical performance.

So for us as physical therapists and healthcare providers, really we need to see these data point to improvements in performances, not just an improvement in muscle mass because we know that a lot of factors can improve muscle mass. The other thing is some of the studies that were included, some included exercise, some didn't. So there were some confounding factors there.

So we weren't really sure, is it the exercise or is it the polyphenol supplementation? Lastly, me as a nutritionally inclined physical therapist, I get a little worried about over-supplementation. Polyphenols, I'll just name a few here. The catechins, those are often found in tea.

Isoflavones, those are usually commonly found in soy and edamame. Marine polyphenols, those are often found in marine fish like salmon and algae like seaweed. And just overall flavonoid cocoa that they included, you can get that from cocoa powder and chocolate.

Sorry, US military. Anyhow, so all that to be mentioned, instead of supplementing with these things, why don't we just tell our patients to eat more soy, eat more salmon, enjoy more green tea instead of supplementing, right? Because when you look at the overall amounts that they supplemented with, like 400 milligrams of catechins, you can get that with just a couple of cups of tea. So anyhow, if you like this, definitely check out more of our content.

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